Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bartmanski, Dominik Maksymilian

Titel

How Icons Work: Material Culture and Post-communist Transformation in Berlin and Warsaw, 1989–2009

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation develops a notion of icon as a social phenomenon. First two chapters explain the analytic purchase of the notion. Remaining three chapters demonstrate its empirical usefulness for elucidating the ways in which contemporary collectivities understand themselves and act as communities with a particular past. Groups and nations do not simply exist by virtue of being there but need to imagine themselves as such. In fact, the term imagined community became one of the most celebrated phrases of modern social sciences. Ironically, the actual images of social imagination and concrete spaces that anchor such imagination have remained relatively unexplored in sociology, even though the classic sociological tradition contains adequate resources to do that. This project shows that the new scientific agenda of the so-called iconic turn combined with these resources helps make up for this lacuna in knowledge. It shows that nations imagine themselves through iconic experiences no less than through narrative practices that have hitherto been epistemologically privileged. Moreover, it shows that the two are mutually conditioned and practically inseparable. The meanings and structures of the iconic experiences can clearly be discerned in the “sacred” social settings, e.g. capital cities, and at the specific “liminal” historical times, e.g. in revolution. Hence the empirical focus of this thesis on the two recent historical contexts that exemplify what happens at the intersection of the sacred and the liminal: Warsaw and Berlin between 1989 and 2009. The detailed sociological discussions of the project reveal icons to be crucial, not merely epiphenomenal to contemporary society's self-imagination in three aspects: (1) structuring society's existence in time by fixing perception and memory; (2) giving it a sense of continuity vis-à-vis historic changes; (3) shaping and mooring its identity in space. These processes are analyzed in chapters three, four and five, respectively. Chapter three reconstructs the cultural trajectory of the Berlin Wall and the Polish Round Table. Chapter four explains cultural expressions of post-revolutionary nostalgia for the communist past in each capital; it focuses on iconic details of lifeworlds. Chapter five discusses the architectural iconography of the respective communist states; it focuses on grand icons of systems. When interpreted from the vantage point of cultural sociology, each case implies a significant shift in sociology's traditional assumptions about social action and order. The first one shows that when it comes to making history, the visually constituted public symbolism can offset or even trump the political and the discursive. The second one shows that the iconic is crucial to the collective sense of belonging, and capable of meaningfully contradicting thc linear “logic of history” in the process of making aspects of the failed past succesful in the present. The third one confirms the finding of the second, and discloses the enduring importance of the urban space and its palpable iconic objects for the self-definition of nations in the age of virtual networks. Together these three case studies provide systematized sociological context in which one of the main characteristics of modernity, disenchantment , is shown to be in need of redefinition, if not displaced as such. Since a key part of sociology's professional identity is being a social science of modernity, this dissertations's new methods and findings speak directly to the old core of the discipline.